| Description | The Pines, Putney Hill
21 Aug 1885
Dear Leighton
I doubt very much whether Shelley himself could have answered your question to your satisfaction. His scholarship was that of a clever but idle boy in the upper forms of a public school. His translation from Plato, as Mr Jowett tells me, and his translation from Euripides, as I know by personal experiment, having carefully collated it with the original text, absolutely swarm with blunders - sometimes, certainly, resulting in sheer nonsense. I fancy he may have been thinking of Aphrodite Urania, and perhaps confounding (as indeed it seems to me that a Greek poet might possibly and pardonably have done) one goddess of divine love with the Muse who was not the Muse of astronomy when she first made her appearance in the Theogony of Flesiod, but simply the 'heavenly one' in a general way - as I gather from a reference to the lexicon. I should have thought Calliope or Euterpe a fitter head mourner for Keats, but probably Shelley wished to introduce the most distinguished in rank of the Muses in that capacity, on such an occasion. And if Urania was in a certain sense of the chief of the nine, she would naturally be 'most musical' of mourners.
Ever yours sincerely
A L Swinburne
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